Sorry, you need to enable JavaScript to visit this website.
  • Article Image Alt Text

Why boys shoot up schools

The way I see it

Recently I was reading National Review Online and found an article written by David French theorizing why boys shoot up schools. After reading it, I came away believing French had hit upon an explanation and as the most recent school shooting in Texas suggest, a rather uncomfortable one.

French writes, “…one of the first questions we ask is the simplest and also the hardest to answer…Why does this keep happening?”

The advocates of gun control and confiscation have the same old tired solutions: guns, and anyone’s ability to own one. No reasonable thinking person buys that one. The Second Amendment is here to stay.

French suggests that all the shootings since the Columbine, Colorado shooting are copycats. He cites several instances of similarities as evidence: wearing similar clothes, videos, manifestos and a feeling of persecution. I find that reasoning unsettling. But, the evidence seems to hold true. He compares these incidents to a riot.

He says each shooting situation is building upon the last one, like a slow-moving riot, moving from one person to another. French wrote, “… a riot is not a collection of individuals, each of whom arrived independently at the decision to break windows. A riot is a social process, in which people do things in reaction to and in combination with those around them. Social processes are driven by our thresholds.”

Each incident lowers the threshold of action each time. Columbine changed the threshold. The Columbine killers planned, wrote manifestos, made video of themselves shooting the weapons they used. Many of the shooters who followed copied closely what these guys did. Some wearing similar clothes, and even writing about and praising the Columbine killers.

The writer notes that of the 12 major school shootings in the United States in the eight years following Columbine, the shooters in eight of the subsequent cases made explicit references to the Columbine killers by name, Harris and Klebold.

“Of the eleven school shootings outside the United States between 1999 and 2007,” French writes, “six were plainly versions of Columbine; of the eleven cases of thwarted shootings in the same period, all were Columbineinspired.”

What is the remedy? How does he suggest we stop it? He writes:

“…it’s a fact that large numbers of mass shooters broadcast warning signals of their intent to do harm, and it’s also a fact that family members and other relevant people close to the shooter have few tools at their disposal to prevent this violence. A gun-violence restraining order can allow a family member (or school principal) to quickly get in front of a local judge for a hearing (with full due-process protections) that can result in the temporary confiscation of weapons from a proven dangerous person.”

And he writes: “There are young men in the grip of a terrible contagion, and there is no cure coming.”

Scary. Do we look askance at every young man in Pittsburg? No. However, it is incumbent upon the family, friends, teachers, and even the police, if they have contact with such a person, to SAY something.

The Pittsburg Gazette

112 Quitman
Pittsburg, TX 75686

Phone: 903-856-6629